Ideas & Trends; Too Much Information, Not Enough Knowledge

On Sept. 11, information was everywhere. Many of those who died in the towers watched what was happening on their televisions, phoned loved ones and sent out messages via BlackBerry, connected almost to the end.

It was cellphone calls from flight attendants that made the airlines aware that at least two planes had been hijacked. Television was explaining that an airplane had hit the north tower while people inside were wondering what the noise was. A woman told her husband on the Pennsylvania plane about the crashes of other hijacked airplanes, and he and fellow passengers apparently rushed the cockpit.

But in the upper reaches of the World Trade Center's south tower, where some 300 people survived the initial impact, there was an open staircase used by at least 18 to flee while at least 200 others, unaware of the exit, made their way to a locked rooftop door. Meanwhile, the Emergency Broadcast System lay dormant.

Was there another way? A system or technology to alert the victims to the opportunities for escape and to guide them away from the dead ends? A way to turn that ad hoc information network into a real public safety system? Perhaps some compilation of automatic messages to pagers, cellphones, e-mail addresses and the ''crawl'' that runs across the bottom of the screen during some news programs? ''It seems like all it would have taken was somebody calling a television station and saying, 'Take the north staircase!' '' said Thomas H. Davenport, Director of the Institute for Strategic Change at the consulting firm Accenture.

Things are, of course, rarely that simple. Most such ideas would have required knowing where everyone was -- and it took weeks to get a clear sense of who had even been in the building that day. In such an emergency, ''the fog of reality is still almost as bad as the fog of war,'' said John Seely Brown, the former director of the research mecca Xerox PARC.

The point applies to far more than the World Trade Center. From intelligence agencies to business leaders to copier repairmen, the critical issue is no longer getting information, but getting the right information to the right people at the right time. And that turns out to be one of the hardest tasks around.

So says the field of ''knowledge management.'' One of the Next Big Things of the 1990's business boom, it promised to turn raw information into the far more valuable commodity of knowledge. Its experts love to quote a former head of Hewlett Packard, who once said: ''If only H.P. knew what H.P. knows, think of how much more successful we would be.''

The field's novelty and some of its cachet has worn off in the business world, but there are still serious thinkers methodically seeking ways to cultivate communities of expertise within organizations and to connect the people who know things with the people who need to know such things. Some are using the World Trade Center disaster and its aftermath to look for new ways to apply knowledge management.

Congress's examination of intelligence failures prior to the Sept. 11 is already yielding snapshots of vast collections of unanalyzed information. ''We didn't know what we knew,'' as one former F.B.I. official put it, in a painful echo of that Hewlett Packard chief.

Knowledge management theorists offer critiques that focus less on blame and more on functional solutions. David Stark, a professor of sociology at Columbia University and director of the school's Center on Organizational Innovation, said that when organizations are structured more like the Internet, with its multiple routes for information, and less like a top-down fiefdom, information flows more freely and efficiently.

A structure, some might say, a little more like Al Qaeda than the F.B.I.

Some caution against putting too much faith in fancy technology. Mr. Davenport, a knowledge-management expert, noted that business has invested billions in relatively effective programs. But, he said, ''Most corporations have come to recognize that technology alone is not the answer,'' while in government ''the tendency is to believe that technology conquers all.'' Meanwhile, the F.B.I. appears ready to gather even more information through broader surveillance powers.

THERE are many, many companies looking for ways to turn the nation's security and intelligence needs into lucrative contracts, and some technofixes are certainly necessary. But so far, no chips-and-code solution can match the capabilities of the prepared mind -- what Mr. Brown wrote about in the book ''The Social Life of Information.'' When people connect, he says, they can connect the dots. And that may be one of the deepest lessons of Sept. 11. Professor Stark studied Manhattan traders who struggled to get back to work after Sept. 11. In an unpublished paper (online at www.coi.columbia.edu/workingpapers), he describes a corporate executive who said that plans for reclaiming computer data in case of disaster had fallen apart ''because so many people had died and the people that knew how to get into these systems and who knew the backup'' were gone and their passwords with them.

So the traders, the executive said, tried to guess: ''They talked about where they went on vacation, what their kids' names were, what their wives' names were, what their dogs' names were, you know, every imaginable thing about their personal life.'' The traders did it: they broke into the ID's and into the necessary systems, and were ready when the bond market opened a few days later. ''No one said, 'Our technology saved us,' or 'Our plan really worked,' the executive said. ''To a person, they said, 'It was people.' ''